Rodrigo Toscano

Compulsory Conviction

Many these days demand a show of faith

Oblations on the altar of justice

Rounding up neophytes, exhaling charms

Cooked up by professional spell casters.

There’s others though that need a space to think

Step back and stoke the embers of feeling

Matching sensing to thinking, cell by cell

Tender shoots of enlightenment spring free.

There’s some these days that don’t need poetry

Or think they don’t, costumed in starchy tweets

Surveying the field of battle with pride

Everyone an instant Napoleon.

When strengthening shoots harden into trunks

Roots twist into action, upturn church walls.

Swap Out

There’s no phrase in the entire English tongue

That gives me the tingles more than “swap out”.

Working folks don’t trade up, let alone, down

They simply––swap out, shit, folks, ideas.

Something’s not working? Have you tried and tried?

Ok! Swap that shit out––let’s get moving.

But the problem is, where get the parts, and how?

Let alone, at the time when you need them.

But even this tune of have-nots and haves

Is something folks swap out, if the tale’s stale.

Working folks, you’ve noticed, prefer new things

Things they’ve thingified to––thingaramas.

There’s another phrase that’s kin to “swap out”

And that is­­­, “crap out”, most folks just––crap out.

Whittlers

Maybe just a whittler, humanity

Playing cards, zipping to mars, calculus

Making plans for the holiday, humming

Reviving the half dead, improving beer

Limping along in old seminaries

Repairing faith’s cracks, upkeeping “the look”

Of everything in sight, or imagined

A grand fugue of finagling a purpose

Then come the puppies, the kittens, the birds

Of no purpose, demanding devotion

And of course, eighty million new whittlers

Of which, a handful will whittle away

On Mars, playing chess, executing codes

Extracting the last plumes of lithium

Gadget

There will be an end to this restless sea

But that time is not our time, it’s the sun’s.

The moon’s boring gray sands are part of us

We made them so; less so, sunspots and flares.

These time-scapes, interposed, call for measure

You are a clock, as am I, without ticks.

It’s other sounds and motions assumed here

That make for mirth or misery expressed

Attempting to express, mostly rebuffed.

Your phone is a rebuff aggregator.

Earth-skimming bi-peds of all persuasions

Live this greedy clock’s demands, tick by tick.

Billions of would-be poems go dark there

Eons before boiling seas vaporize.